Jan Zwicky

Jan Zwicky is one of Canada’s most innovative intellectual figures and most skilled versifiers, particularly appreciated for her expressions of music and philosophy to be found in lyrical form upon the page. As a poet, philosophy teacher, and musician, Zwicky strives to give voice to the ecology of experience in her extensive body of work. Her poetry collection Songs for Relinquishing the Earth won the Governor General’s Literary Award in 1999 and Robinson’s Crossing won the Dorothy Livesay Prize and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award in 2004.

On Barrett Watten's questions

It is no accident that the title of Barrett Watten’s second twenty-first-century critical book analyzing Language writing as an ongoing “presence” within the avant-garde continuum and literary history echoes Roman Jakobson’s 1977 collection of essays, Questions de poetique[1] Just as Jakobson’s essays interrogate the precarious position of poetry in an age saturated with analog media (e.g., how poetry is and is not different from the newspaper, the radio, television, etc.), so too Watten’s essays address the position of poetry in relationship to other modes of inn